Karl's Garden Blog

Out of all the things I thought I might someday put in a garden, a toad was definitely not on that list. In fact, I’d probably in the past have gone out of my way to get a toad OUT of the garden if I’d ever noticed it in the first place.

Until the Cucumber Beetle struck. It struck and it ate my bush zucchini and was all over every other plant in the garden before I knew it. I was squishing them by hand at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I’d cover every plant, including the entire forest of pole beans and the fiercely indeterminate Roma plant that seems to be obsessed with forming the densest tomato plant ever grown inside it’s cage, but refuses to grow upwards.

Perusing the forums I frequent, I saw an article about making your garden an inviting place for a toad to live. Toad? Why toads? Well, toads eat three times their weight in bugs, grubs, ants and worms a day. I have a giant population of bugs, grubs, ants, and worms. There’s also a giant population of toads in my neighborhood, which has a wonderful wooded creek running through it. It seems that I practically squish a dozen any time Henry and I go jogging.

Yesterday, I grabbed the broken pot that I was about to pitch and put it in the garden. I also sunk a tupperware container into the mulch/compost so that some of the water would stay in there on days that I didn’t water.

a Toad Home -- complete with water feature and damp compost to burrow in!

Then I went toad hunting! It wasn’t hard. All I had to do was coax the toad into a tupperware with a cracked screw-on lid. He tried his best to escape, but I quickly ran him through the house (the dogs, of course, were fascinated) and let him loose in the back of the garden.

I noticed an immediate reduction (if not outright elimination) of the Cucumber Beetle in particular. I haven’t had to squish one of the nasty buggers ever since I let the little guy out of the toad catcher.

And frankly, I haven’t seen the toad since, but as long as the bug population stays low, I know he’s doing his job!